The Milky Way slants across Britain's NE sky this evening and flows through the Summer Triangle high on our meridian before dawn. Sadly, its dim stars are washed away by the twilight that lasts throughout the night as we approach the northern hemisphere's summer solstice at 00:09 BST on the 21st.

From south of the equator, though, the corresponding winter solstice sees the Milky Way soaring overhead in the middle of the night while the star clouds around the core of our Milky Way Galaxy lie near the zenith. Also visible, and climbing higher in the SSE later in the night, are two pools of light that appear like detached portions of the Milky Way. We know these as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, the LMC and the SMC, though they had been sighted long before the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan set sail in 1519 on what would become the first circumnavigation of the world.

Both clouds are dwarf companion galaxies in orbit around the Galaxy, and their irregular structures contrast with the ordered spiral form of our Galaxy and our famous neighbour in Andromeda. The LMC is some 160,000 ly (light years) away and 14,000 ly across, while the SMC is 200,000 ly distant and half as wide. With the mass of perhaps 10 billion Suns, the LMC is one hundredth as massive as the Galaxy yet its gravity is enough to warp the plane of the Galaxy and draw out streams of hydrogen that connect the Galaxy to the LMC and on to the SMC.

Our image shows a portion of the LMC and includes the bright Tarantula Nebula near the top which is a region of intense star formation, like a supercharged Orion Nebula. The reddish wisps and loops of excited hydrogen gas bear witness to death of the larger stars in supernovae explosions.

Indeed, the brightest supernova since 1604 erupted just below and right of the Tarantula 25 years ago and reached mag 2.9. I recall seeing it through my humble binoculars as it stood just above the southern horizon as viewed from Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii, becoming one of the very few people on US soil to spot it. Meanwhile, the giant telescopes and expensive instruments all around me could not even be pointed that low in the sky. SN 1987A, as it is called, is still being studied (from the S hemisphere) as its radiation and debris impact on the material around it.

Observations of the clouds has revealed much about stellar evolution and suggest that they hold proportionally more primordial hydrogen and helium than does our Galaxy.